A History of Community Asset Ownership

A history of community asset ownership by Steve Wyler I would like to thank the Development Trusts Association Board for allowing me to take a research sabbatical in 2007 and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for financial assistance and encouragement. Steve Wyler Steve has been Director of the Development Trusts Association since 2000. The Development Trusts Association is a fast growing UK-wide movement, bringing together over 450 community-led organisations, which use self-help, social enterprise, and community asset ownership to bring about long-term social, economic and environmental renewal, and transform their communities for good. Over the last twenty years Steve has worked for voluntary and community agencies as well as independent grant-makers, including working with homeless agencies during the 1990s; running the Homeless Network, co-ordinating the Rough Sleepers Initiative and setting up Off the Streets and into Work. Recently Steve has been a member of various government advisory groups on social enterprise, community assets, and the third sector. Steve is vice-Chair of the Coalition for Social Enterprise, Board member of the Adventure Capital Fund, and Board member of The Glass House community design service. © Steve Wyler, Development Trusts Association August 2009 with Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Introduction In the last few years community ownership of land and buildings has become, alongside social enterprise, a hot topic across the political spectrum, evidenced by manifesto promises, government reports and White Papers, enabling legislation, regulation and guidance, new investment funds, community right to buy legislation in Scotland, a review by the Welsh Assembly and an Asset Transfer Unit for England. Despite continuing resistance from state municipalists and free-market fanatics alike, practice has kept pace with the promise. Within the expanding development trusts movement there now exists nearly £500m of assets in community ownership – empty and derelict buildings transformed into busy workspace, training rooms, conference centres, community run shops and restaurants, affordable housing, wasteland reclaimed for parks, community woodland, farms and allotments. An idea whose time has come? If so, it has been a long time coming. For hundreds of years the idea of community owned assets has run like a golden thread though our social history. Generation after generation, people have called for a different way of doing things, where land and buildings would belong neither to private landowners nor to the state, but would be held instead in trust and controlled by local communities, to provide amenities and create prosperity for the common good. If we go back far enough, communities really did own their assets – indeed there was a time when community ownership of land in particular was not the exception, but rather the rule. A history of community asset ownership 3 Free born Englishmen Once land belonged to ‘free-born Englishmen’, but after 1066 the Norman invaders took the best of it for themselves. Even then, the peasants retained access to the unfenced commons, and remained in some respects a self governing community. In the wake of the Black Death, in which a third of the entire population of England perished, came the social upheavals that culminated in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, bringing with it new and radical ideas. Before 1066 land in England was return for providing relief from hardship, owned not by wealthy landlords, nor and were paid in labour instead of by the state, nor even by the monarchy, food rent. But extensive common lands but rather by free peasant proprietors, remained, and all the people of a or ‘coerls’. Each family cultivated its own district or village shared the right to smallholding and undertook communal these lands. activities within their own village. The ceorl was an independent ‘free born Englishman’, subject only to the king, The Norman yoke to whom he had to provide military The Norman occupation changed all this. service when required, and the only tax After his victory William the Conqueror was an annual food rent, a quantity of handed out the land of England as spoils provision sufficient to maintain the king of war to his mercenaries, and as a and his retinue for a day. result, ownership of land was no longer absolute, but rested on permission This system was beginning to break of the king, the ultimate owner. Parts down even before the Norman conquest. of the kingdom were kept by William The Saxon kings rewarded supporters for himself ‘in demesne’, and the rest by making them ‘thegns’ or territorial was divided among about 180 barons, lords, and bestowed charters transferring on the understanding they would to the thegns the rights of claiming provide knights for battle when the need military service and food rent from the arose. In turn the barons retained peasants. In some places, when harvests a portion of the land allotted to them failed, thegns would take over land in as their own demesne and divided the 4 Development Trusts Association rest among knights, each of whom rural England. There were no hedges was under a military obligation to or fences; the cultivated land was the barons (and thus to the king). a single large open field, and every The churches and monasteries also year a communal gathering of villagers retained demesne lands and sub-let at the manor-court or court-leet would the rest of their holdings. allot to each man several narrow strips, taking care to share out the good and As for the conquered Saxons, they bad land equally, and on these narrow became serfs: survival in exchange strips each villager tried to grow enough for servitude. Where the population food to feed himself and his family. resisted they were annihilated, and their villages burnt, and for decades after The nobility were expected to provide 1066 great swathes of England especially basic assistance in cases where the in the North remained depopulated. poor became ill, or a man died and The nobility, naturally, kept the best land left a widow and children. Anyone who themselves. Villagers were required to did not work or who committed a give up a set number of days to work transgression was punished, or outlawed the lord’s demesne land, and to serve and left to starve to death in the woods as foot soldiers if there was war. There or wastelands. A rudimentary legal were many other rights and obligations, system did provide some limited varying from place to place, more safeguards for the common people, often preserved by custom than written and above all ‘habeas corpus’ ensured into formal statute. The village peasants that no man could be held in prison were obliged to grind their corn at the without being charged and put on trial lord’s mill, and if they wanted to marry, by a jury of his peers. But the lord they would first have to beg the lord’s held power in his manor, and was, permission, and pay a tribute. in practice, judge, jury and executioner. Moreover, there was also the church, But though in relation to the lord of which claimed its tithes from the poor, the manor they were serfs, in relation to made its own laws and held its own each other the peasants were in many courts, made certain that the common respects a self-governing community. people remained illiterate, controlled In most places, the landscape they public and private morality, and built worked was very unlike that of modern splendid cathedrals. A history of community asset ownership 5 The commons economies. Only the monasteries grew Beyond the open field was unenclosed rich, and were hated for it. common land where the villagers had rights, granted not by statute but by immemorial custom, to cut the long The Black Death grass to make hay, to gather fuel from The Black Death changed everything. the woodland, or to graze their cattle It arrived in England in 1348, landing if they had any. There were also vast at Melcombe in Weymouth bay and forests, but these belonged to the spreading rapidly across the country. king and only the king and his nobility A third or more of the population were allowed to hunt the deer, wild perished, causing immense distress boar, rabbits, and other game. Poaching and social upheaval However, because was a national sport, but punishable of labour shortages, the working by death. people who survived found themselves everywhere in a stronger economic This system was, to a degree, position than before. A class of free sustainable. The villagers were allowed yeoman farmers emerged, who paid rent to gather wood for fuel, but only twigs on land and cattle, and in turn offered and branches they could reach with employment to farm labourers. There was a shepherd’s crook or a haymaker’s rapid transition towards a wage economy, hook, and therefore the woodlands were and bonds which for centuries had tied not destroyed and would continue, peasant workers to the villages in which winter after winter, providing fuel for the they were born were broken. Itinerant poor. It was nevertheless a subsistence workers and their families moved from economy. The villagers on their narrow village to village selling their labour, with strips, with rudimentary implements and neither the restraints nor protections of limited farming methods, could barely the feudal system. grow enough to feed themselves. There was little travel or trade between Wages were driven ever higher. communities, let alone nations. What Inevitably there were attempts to restore wealth the king and barons gathered control, and laws were passed to limit to themselves was more often the pillage wage levels. Suddenly the economy of war (the main purpose of the later was booming.

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